A new report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows that the youth incarceration rate in the U.S. “reached a new 35-year low” in 2010. Iowa was one of 44 states where fewer young people were locked up in 2010 than in 1997.

The full report on “Reducing Youth Incarceration in the United States” is here (pdf). Excerpt:

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention show that youth confinement peaked in 1995, at 107,637 in confinement on a single day. Since then the number of youth confined has dropped by nearly 37,000 to 70,792. Over that same period, the rate of youth in confinement dropped by 41 percent, from 381 per 100,000 youth to 225 per 100,000. Moreover, this decline has accelerated in recent years. The annual rate of decline from 2006 to 2010 was roughly three times faster than from 1997 to 2006. Despite this rapid decline, the United States still locks up a larger share of the youth population than any other developed country.

Table 1 on page 3 shows youth confinement total numbers and rates per 100,000 population in every state between 1997 and 2010. In Iowa, 1,065 youths were incarcerated in 1997, a rate of 308 per 100,000 population. In 2010, the total number of incarcerated youths in Iowa had dropped to 738, and the rate had dropped to 227 per 100,000 population. That’s a decline of 26 percent, somewhat less than the 37 percent decline in the youth incarceration rate for the country as a whole.

You can view total youth incarceration numbers for each state here. Iowa’s 2010 incarceration rate per 100,000 population was 28th out of the 50 states.

Speaking to the Public News Service about the new study,

Michael Crawford, senior associate and fiscal director at the Child and Family Policy Council, credited early intervention for the drop in the numbers nationally and in Iowa.

“We’re working with the kids earlier on and preventing where they get to the point where they are actually incarcerated,” he said, “so I think that is good sign, but also I think we’re just following along the lines of what European countries are doing, just realizing that locking kids up is not a good idea because basically what it does is turn them into criminals as adults.”

He said Iowa has developed alternatives to putting young people behind bars, “like after-school programs or mentoring programs, situations where adults or peers can work with the kids to maybe help them stay on track.”

The study found that juvenile crime rates have fallen even as the number of youths being incarcerated has dropped.

Finding alternatives to incarceration makes sense for other reasons too. The new report notes on page 2,

In every year for which data are available, the overwhelming majority of confined youth are held for nonviolent offenses. In 2010, only one of every four confined youth was locked up based on a Violent Crime Index offense (homicide, aggravated assault, robbery or sexual assault). At the other end of the spectrum, nearly 40 percent of juvenile commitments and detentions are due to technical violations of probation, drug possession, low-level property offenses, public order offenses and status offenses (activities that would not be crimes for adults, such as possession of alcohol or truancy). This means most confined youth pose relatively low public safety risks.

Researchers have proposed various theories to explain falling crime rates. Lead poisoning may be correlated with juvenile crime, and crime rates have declined as lead has become less prevalent in our environment. Iowa and other states should continue to invest in lead remediation along with early-intervention for behavioral issues.

In 2011, the Annie E. Casey Foundation released a comprehensive report laying out “the case for reducing juvenile incarceration.”

Juvenile correctional facilities do not reduce future offending. Instead, they waste taxpayer dollars and frequently expose youth to dangerous and abusive conditions.